Archive for May, 2012

Things have been quiet in here lately, folks, and I can’t guarantee that will change in the near future. I have quite a few pressing concerns this year, not least of which is my impending status as a first-time father approximately three months from now, so time set aside for blogging whimsy will likely be reduced for the foreseeable future. That said, there are forthcoming film releases that I’ll simply have to talk about, and there’s always the possibility of those Nork arseholes doing something worthy of some commentary, so sporadic blogging will hopefully continue here and there. If things get desperate, I’ll just bore the ever-loving shite out of all of you with talk of my new baby.

In the meantime, feel free to revisit some past efforts preserved here.

Actually, they’ve been “back” for about two months now but that’s how long it has taken me to ensnare a passing flying fuck and get around to telling you all about it. Their latest mini-album, ‘Alive’, was released on February 29th and they appear to have thrown out three singles in quick succession thereafter. Of these songs, two are fairly simpering affairs that merit little further comment, but one of them, ‘Fantastic Baby’, has just the requisite amount of electro-pop charm and a ludicrous enough music video to warrant having the keen eye of the Korner cast upon it.

The song itself is Big Bang aiming for a club anthem and, as such, it’s an uncomplicated affair entreating everyone to dance, dance, dance. The lyrics veer from simplistic hip-hop self-aggrandizement to the abjectly nonsensical, although there is always the possibility that a great deal is being lost in translation.

From one to ten, everything is one level above/ Even if we crazily run on sand, we’re still so agile/ Because the sky is blue enough.

That’s their rather abstract way of saying that they’re hot shit and they follow it later with the insightful line, “Ice, ice, ice, hold up/ Na na na na”. That said, it’s a fairly catchy tune and it gets the job done, but where the K-Pop of YG Entertainment really excels is in the eyeball-fucking insanity of the more elaborate music videos. They’re not always as interesting or amusing as this one; the video for Big Bang’s song ‘Blue’ just has them fannying about in parts of New York, indulging in their favored fetish of chasing after white chicks (something I’ve already observed from G-Dragon and TOP but failed to adequately explore here).

There have been loud murmurs of discontent amongst cinemagoers regarding the amount of superhero films that have recently been sprayed on the viewing public and, to the extent that most of these films haven’t been of the best quality, these complaints can be said to be justified. The fault likely lies in the poor ratio of good to bad here. For every single over-achieving, runaway success like Iron Man or The Dark Knight, there have been several titles that are either mediocre, at best, or downright terrible. There have also been trilogy franchises like Spiderman and X-Men that needed an initial film to establish their respective origin stories before really hitting their stride and peaking in the second film, only for their third outings to be woeful shit that tainted the entire series retroactively (Spiderman 3 is, to quote the hooker-assassin in Munich, “such a fucking waste of talent”). Superhero-flick fatigue is only to be expected at this stage, but it also frames this as precisely the right time for a truly great superhero movie to come along and remind us of how much fun they can be and, thankfully, that is exactly where The Avengers comes in.

Here Loki, the principal antagonist from Thor, returns to menace mankind as he snatches the Tesseract, the cosmic cube artifact of unlimited power first seen in Captain America, on behalf of mysterious alien beings offering him dominion over the Earth in return. In response to this emergency, S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) assembles his team of erstwhile superheroes to defeat Loki and save the world, but not before they have to overcome their own flaws and character defects (like being a rich, selfish asshole or a potentially super-destructive, raging monster) and learn to work as a team to fight for the greater good and what have you. There’s no great mystery to the plot structure, but what this film is really about is how the Avengers are brought together and how much fun it is to have all these characters, ahem, assembled as such on the screen. It’s the ambitious cinematic adaptation of the wider Marvel Universe, as opposed to individual characters alone, and it appears to be an experiment and gamble that has overwhelmingly paid off.